Sleaford Mods – English Tapas (Rough Trade)

 

England’s not burning, they’re drowning in lard and apathy.  That’s the main premise behind the duo’s new English Tapas – a bitter, sludgy tasting plate of modern life in Blighty.

Sleaford Mods come across as a mix John Cooper Clarke’s thick accent and voice, the ranting style of John Lydon and the meandering, sparse instrumentation and storytelling of The Streets.  This is their first outing on the Rough Trade (their 9^th studio album) and, appropriately enough, it’s close to the label’s own Post Thatcherite-era punk roots.

The whole album, as a piece, has one mission: to prove that Great Britain is not in fact ‘great’.  In fact, they argue in their own intense bovver-boy, pub bastard fashion that the good ol’ motherland is nothing a nation of racist, sloppy, self-loathing, tasteless, tactless, self-important w*nkers sedated out of submission by cheap imported lager and BREXIT delusions.

It’s not hard to get on board with the Mods’ point of view.  There’s more than one reference to BREXIT (particularly on the songs Cuddly and Dull).  At one point, they directly call out the xenophobia: “Every fucking week there’s another Black Death / Another old man in a robe and that, yeah bleak” (Cuddly).  On Carlton Touts vocalist Jason Williamson reverts to mock-mourning the dislodged elites and middle classes “Bring back the neo-libs, I’m sorry/I didn’t f*cking mean to pray for anarch-eh!” It’d be too easy just to call this a BREXIT album.  That’s just too shallow.

No doubt the album title is an ironic joke.  Spanish food, like it people, is warm, spicy, vibrant passionate.  The English are as dull as cold dishwater.  English Tapas mostly deals with the desperate fate of the tragic and washed-up modern British male, who’s so pathetic and tinny that he can’t even live up to the low expectations that have been set for him.

Time and again, Williamson slates his contemporaries, in his surly Midlands accent, mocking everything from drinking ‘foreign piss’ to deluded weekend soldiering in the reserves (Army Nights): “They call me Dyson/ I fucking clean up”.  That song’s the album opener and sets the tone making fun of a particular type of idiotic male culture that still resides in the mess halls, stag-dos, locker rooms and clubrooms of England — anywhere where men congregate without women. Given the recent events of some of our rugby teams, school boys, and Roastbusters that’ve made the headlines lately it would seem this is still a universal topic.

For all those 80’s rock geezers out there, the Mods take a drunkard swing on Just Like We Do – a swipe at those music snobs who detest the Mods (‘cos they’re famous).  “Punk’s not dead, well, it is now / Or does no one care about you? / Given half the chance you’d walk around like twat just like we do.  Mind, Williamson does acknowledge that he “used to be one of ‘em”.  He’s not completely ‘holier than thou’ on that one).

There’s a sort of loose morality running through the Mods’ music that champions the oppressed over the economic greed and self-importance of others.  I can’t wait to see what they do with celebrity status and its fake class system,

The Lead single B.H.S. is direct and cutting, addressing the disgraced tycoon Philip Green, who was responsible for asset-stripped his department store and fleeing to the Med leaving his staff without pensions.  With little wizardry, save a simple bass line, Williamson and Fearn have turned it into a sort of jerky rendition of the Chicken dance.  I can just imagine Go-Go dancers on RTR Countdown bopping along to this on the 1970’s TV hit show.

Over and over Williamson keeps coming back to alcohol and substance abuse — specifically when it’s used to dumb down or shut out the misery and monotony of daily of existence. Messy Anywhere is the new Born Slippy (“Lager, Lager, Lager”).  It’s a lad’s-on-the-piss rant about the stupidity of going out and getting smashed whilst our overlords watch from their high windows rubbing their hands in glee. It’s an acknowledgement that the lower classes won’t be uprising when they are so heavily subdued with alcoholic self-medication and Kardashians.

You can’t deny Williamson isn’t a ‘ranter’.  He’s full on Alfie Garnett, only lacking the handkerchief hat and suspenders.  But he’s also funny as he is angry.  Sometimes his best lines come at the end of a string of visceral verbal diorhea – “Ya so dead in the head you got a job-facing life” (Messy Anywhere) or “Car crash into the void of the Magna Carta” (Snout); and my favourite “I had an organic chicken it was shit” (Cuddly). No need for poetry here. Take that, Jamie Oliver!

Yet for all the humour, mockery and self-effacement there’s still a real sense of desperation on this record and like Clarke’s Evidently Beasley Street a grimy layer of emptiness and unfulfillment floating like soap scum on a cup of transport cafe tea.  All that drudgery could be summed up in the lines of Time Sands: “quiet hell/Of cigarettes and trains and plastic and bad brains.”

If ever there was an argument for why Britain is going down the toilet fast, then this is it.  Johnny Rotten once whined that there was no future for “England’s dreaming”.  Sleaford Mods, potentially the kids born after Lydon’s generation, have inevitably shown that England has gone back to the future and it’s not a pretty place.

Tim Gruar